Health Care Ethics Consortium of Georgia ...ethics in action

Could we cure diseases faster, or at least better control them, through crowd-sourcing?

Physicians can deactivate implanted defibrillators and pacemakers when terminally ill patients request it, according to new guidelines from the Heart Rhythm Society.

Freshmen and transfers are asked to send in a sample of their saliva to be analyzed for reactions to 3 dietary substances. Privacy watchdogs and ethicists criticize the move.

A jury in New York Supreme Court in Queens began deliberating whether a kidney transplant that Vincent Liew received from a woman with uterine cancer hastened his death.

For the third time this year, Congress is scrambling to stave off a hefty pay cut to doctors treating Medicare patients. The 21.3 percent cut will take effect June 1 unless lawmakers intervene in the next few days.

Catholics should use caution in deciding whether to have genetic testing and should do so only with a doctor's counsel, a Catholic ethicist said.

Organ transplants save thousands of lives every year, but many more people languish on waiting lists because of a serious shortage of organs. While proposals to increase the supply have gained some followers, opinions differ on whether they will work -- or even if they should be tried at all.

"Vitamin D's downsides" [May 18] reported that the vitamin has been in the news lately because it is deficient in many Americans. There is no mention of the fact that many doctors are recommending a daily intake of 1,000 IUs (international units) to reduce cancer risk.

Andrew Wakefield, the doctor who liked vaccine with Autism, can no longer practice medicine in Britain.

Will creating life help us understand life?

Working with a team of chemists, cell biologists, surgeons, material scientists and engineers, Molly Stevens is developing techniques that will help the body repair itself when it suffers damage to tissue. This is the science of regenerative medicine.

Church says manmade DNA can have a positive impact as long as it is not used to create life.

Can big health innovations keep your health care bills small?

Using a made-from-scratch genome, scientists have breathed a new kind of life into a bacterium. The feat, published May 21 in Science, holds great promise for creating designer organisms that might do things like produce vaccines, synthesize biofuels, purify water or eat spilled oil.

Bioethicists have reacted with caution to the announcement that scientists in the US have created the first synthetic living cell.

Children were the leading growth demographic for the pharmaceutical industry in 2009, with the increase of prescription drug use among youngsters nearly four times higher than in the overall population, according to a report by Medco Health Solutions Inc (MHS.N).

A small but growing number of physicians are abandoning traditional insurance-based practice to offer VIP treatment, including more time with patients, in return for upfront fees. In one common setup, often called concierge or retainer-based medicine, a primary care doctor charges an annual fee ranging from $1,000 to $20,000 just to get in the door.

A nun who concurred in an ethics committee’s decision to abort the child of a gravely ill woman at a Phoenix hospital was “automatically excommunicated by that action,” according to Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted of Phoenix.

Instead of the usual required summer-reading book, this year’s incoming freshmen at the University of California, Berkeley, will get something quite different: a cotton swab on which they can, if they choose, send in a DNA sample.

Art Caplan says that typing "genetic testing" into an internet search engine will send consumers on one wild ride...but that is just the beginning.